Over the past few weeks, Vladimir Vukićević has been working on getting TraceMonkey working on the ARM architecture which is frequently used in mobile and handheld devices. “[M]obile and handheld platforms are going to quickly become consumers of the full web, and core performance gains will often yeild much more significant user-perceptible performance improvements. The result of all this work will be a richer web experience on mobile and embedded devices, by allowing those users to take advantage of modern web applications that do much of their work on the browser instead of server side.” Vlad’s TraceMonkey work will be available for testing in the next alpha release of Fennec (the code name for Firefox Mobile) by enabling a configuration setting the same way testers can enable TraceMonkey in Firefox nightly builds. For more information, including a host of technical details, see Vlad’s weblog.

Ryan Paul of Ars Technica posted an interesting two-page article last week explaining why Mozilla remains committed to Gecko while WebKit popularity is increasing. As WebKit has been adopted by more browsers, Ryan writes, “some technology enthusiasts are beginning to wonder if the days are numbered for Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine.” This is not at all the case, however, and “those who understand the differences between the two rendering engines and have an appreciation of Gecko’s technical strengths recognize that there is no basis for speculation about the possibility of Mozilla adopting [WebKit] for future versions of Firefox.” In the article, Ryan discusses WebKit’s strengths, why Apple opted for WebKit over Gecko in 2003, how Gecko has evolved and improved since, why Gecko is preferred by a host of third-party developers, and more.

In writing the article, Ryan spoke with Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s VP of Engineering. “Although [Shaver] respects the technical achievements of WebKit, he believes that the WebKit development model and fragmentation in the WebKit ecosystem would create serious challenges that make it unsuitable for Firefox.” Shaver goes into much more detail in the article, which you can find over on the Ars Technica site.